Black Sunday

Black Sunday, also known as The Mask of Satan or La maschera del dominio in some territories is a 1960 Italian horror movie about a beautiful vampire-witch who is given new life two hundred years after her brutal murder. The movie opens with a horrific scene in which the witch, Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) is put to death at the stake with a spiked, iron mask hammered onto her face. Blood splatters through the mask’s holes and drips down the woman’s body in a scene which would still shock if released today. For 1960s though, the same year that Alfred Hitchcock got into trouble for showing a toilet flushing in Psycho, its effect must have been extraordinary. The movie continues the trend of shocking throughout its 90 minute runtime but doesn’t simply rely on it. Black Sunday, despite its surprising gore, is a well made film which looks and sounds great and has a very good story at its centre.

The film was directed by Mario Bava in what was technically his debut feature. Previously a cinematographer, he had unofficially completed several films as a director but was always uncredited as he took over from directors who left the films they were helming. His background as a cinematographer helped here to blend beauty and gore and produce a film whose reputation stands out against the plethora of similar films from its period.

The Ultimate Greatest Films of All Time #34th-76th

For the last couple of months I've been compiling a greatest film list based on other greatest film lists. Here are the results of the films from 34th to 76th. Check back soon for 1st to 33rd. If you want to know how I got the results, click here. You can click on a film title for my review.

Night at the Museum

The perfect family film for a Bank Holiday Monday morning, Night at the Museum is a film in which history comes to life. Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is divorced and unable to hold down a steady job in New York City. His ex-wife believes that the constant uprooting is affecting their ten year old son and pleads with him to settle down and get a steady job. Larry takes a job at the Museum of Natural History as a night watchman but soon discovers that the job is much harder than advertised as the exhibits literally come to life after dark.

I’ve seen this film a few times now but I’m not really sure why. It’s quite fun and passes a couple of hours but it’s by no stretch of the imagination, a classic. Night at the Museum is one of those films that you can put on and turn off the brain, allowing the noises and images to wash over you as your eyes glaze over. What it offers is silly fun and a treat for kids. Unfortunately I watched it alone, in my pyjamas.

The Ultimate Greatest Films of All Time #77th-115th

After weeks of work, the first part of my Ultimate Greatest Movies of All Time list is ready. I used several lists to calculate the best movies ever and over the next few days I'll be publishing the results. This first part includes the films ranked 77th-115th. The films placed above these will be published in the coming days. To see how I completed the list, click here. You can click on a film's title to read my review of it.

Six of the Best... Marvel Films

Marvel Studios have been responsible for creating some of the biggest box office draws in recent years with their variety of super hero movies taking over from the action movies that preceded them as some of the highest earning films in the world. Beginning as Marvel Films in the early 1990s, the studio originally turned their comic book properties into animated cartoons and with the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men they created popular and long running animated series. The studio began venturing into movies in the late 1990s with co-productions alongside large studios and began going it alone in 2008. Here are Six of the Best…

6. Spider-Man 2 (2004). The best of the Sam Raimi trilogy, Spider-Man 2 contained some decent CGI and great stunt work as well as a deeper, more emotional story than the first movie. It’s funny and the ‘spidey cam’ looks great. It’s just a shame that Raimi went on to ruin all the good work in his third movie.

The Greatest Films of All Time #1-33

For the last couple of months I've been combining top movie lists to find out once and for all what the best movies ever made are. You can read about the process here and a full list of 742 films in contention will be released later but here is the top 33 in ascending order.

All the President's Men

This 1976 political thriller is based on the book of the same name by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the two reporters who were responsible for uncovering the facts of the Watergate Scandal which ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Nominated for eight Academy Awards it won three and is often regarded as one of the best political thrillers of all time.

The movie manages to capture the sense of urgency, frustration and fear that must be present inside a major newspaper office as its staff are working on a sensitive story such as the one depicted here. It portrays journalistic workings in what appears to be an accurate way and follows the story from beginning to, not quite the end, but a satisfactorily conclusion. The central partnership is strong and ebbs and flows from distrust to jealousy to solid teamwork and mutual admiration and respect. The film also gets to the heart of the Watergate Scandal, introducing a lot of characters who would otherwise have been lost in history.

Citizen Kane

If you were to talk about the best video game ever made, you might describe it as ‘The Citizen Kane of video games’. You might describe New York City as ‘The Citizen Kane of cities’. Personally I mentioned in my review of The Room that it’s known as ‘The Citizen Kane of bad movies’ Citizen Kane has come to be used as a bench mark for all that is great. The best of the best. The top ‘thing’ in any particular field. This of course arose due to the 1941 films’ long held standing of being the greatest motion picture ever made. For fifty years it topped Sight and Sound’s poll of the ten best movies of all time, it is listed as the AFI’s top movie and is currently battling for top spot with one other on my Ultimate Greatest Films of All Time list which is under construction at time of writing.

To my great shame I’d never seen the movie until today. I’m twenty-seven, have been interested in film for nearly a decade and have been writing about the medium for over a year yet I’d never seen the ‘greatest of them all’. If I’m honest I can’t put my finger on why. The movie wasn’t difficult to track down; I have no issue with the black and white, the time period or the subject matter. I think I’ve narrowed down my reasons to two things. The first is the title. Citizen Kane doesn’t do anything for me and as titles go I don’t think it’s particularly strong but I think the main reason was that I was afraid of disappointment. So many times since I began to write my thoughts on film I have been let down and then let down my readers when I didn’t get or didn’t like classic, highly rated films. I think The Lion King is poor, I gave North by Northwest 6/10 and much of 8 ½ was lost on me. It was with great trepidation then that I recently took the plunge and bought Citizen Kane on Blu-ray. And was I disappointed? The short answer to that question is, no. A slightly longer answer is No, I wasn’t and for a longer answer still, you can read the next 1,110 words.

Bullitt

When a defecting Chicago Mobster arrives in San Fransisco ahead of a Senate Sub Committee hearing on Organised Crime, the SFPD are tasked with providing around the clock protection in his cheap boarding house. When hitmen burst in, shooting and seriously wounding a police officer and the mobster turned witness, Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) and Sergeant Dalgetti (Don Gordon) pick up the trail to hunt down the murders while uncovering a deeper plot. Their progress is hindered by the ambitious politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) who wants the witness back on the stand and blames Bullitt for the attack.

Bullitt is one of those classic, cool 60s movies which I’ve always wanted to see but never got around to doing so until now. I was aware of the famous car chase and that Steve McQueen was meant to have given one of his trademark edgy, cooler than ice performances but I knew little else. As well as the above, the film has a lot to offer the viewer from a fantastic score to impressive cinematography but I was never engaged in the storyline.

Young Frankenstein

When people look back at the films they remember fondly from their childhood, they often remember them through rose tinted spectacles. When I saw The Lion King last year and rated it 6/10 I was given disapproving looks from those who saw it when they were children. One of the films I remember fondly from my childhood is Young Frankenstein. I saw it several times when I was young as it was one of the few VHS movies my parents owned at the time. I haven’t seen the film for about thirteen or so years and while I remembered lots of it, there was much which I’d forgotten or had gone over my head as a child. I’m able to appreciate the film more as an adult and understand the subtle performance of Marty Feldman, get more of the horror in jokes and laugh at the racier stuff which was once lost on me. Young Frankenstein isn’t as good as I remembered, it’s better.

The film came about after an idea Gene Wilder had while filming Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks. Wilder thought that it would be funny to create a distant relative of the Frankenstein family who wanted nothing to do with the rest of the family and their infamous experiments. The film was put into production shortly after Saddles wrapped and the plot took from the early Frankenstein movies of the 1930s as well as borrowed affectionately from the horror genre and classic comedy. Dr. Fredrick Frankenstein (Wilder) is a brilliant American physician/lecturer who discovers that he has inherited the family’s old world estate. He travels to Transylvania where his grandfather’s experiments get the better of his curious mind.